ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Echoes of Life and Loss: Portrayal of Human Values and Nature in Select Verses in Ripples on the Sands of Time

This paper examines the interwoven themes of human values, endurance, mortality, and the natural world reflected in the seven selected poems in Ripples on the Sands of Time. It presents how Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life foregrounds moral courage and purposeful living, and Whitman’s Animals while contrasting human restlessness with the instinctive balance of the natural world, emphasizing literature’s role in interrogating human conduct. Rossetti’s When I Am Dead My Dearest introduces the inevitability of death and the serenity of acceptance, whereas Kipling’s If celebrates resilience and moral fortitude as guiding principle of human values. Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree evokes a Romantic yearning for solitude and spiritual renewal in nature which gets counterbalanced by O’Connor’s ecological vision in The Olive Tree with emphasis on interdependence and environmental preservation. Achebe’s Refugee Mother and Child, rooted in the postcolonial experience, shifts the discourse towards suffering, maternal sacrifice, and the fragility of life in the face of political and social displacement. Together, these poems offer a dialogue across cultures and centuries, knitting a variety of human concerns where life, loss, and nature intersect. This paper argues that these poems present enduring poetic voices and frames human existence as inseparable from the values of resilience, empathy, and ecological consciousness, making them relevant to both personal reflection and contemporary global challenges. While reading across these varied yet complementary works, this paper analyzes how poetry continues to offer ripples of wisdom on the changing sands of time. Keywords: human values, mortality, resilience, nature, ecological consciousness, cultural dialogue, wisdom.